Foundation of inspiration
Last week I was privileged to attend the Batemans Bay Youth Foundation grants presentation dinner, where 10 worthy young people received grants to help them in their first year of university .
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It was such a thrill to listen to these young men and women in their aspirations for the future.
You often hear negative comments about our young people, but to listen to these recipients from the Eurobodalla was inspiring.
Tricia Wheeler
Durras North
Inglorious GST
With so much talk surrounding the possible expansion of its base and an increase in percentage of the GST, methinks we're being conditioned to the inevitability of such moves.
For the folk in government agitating for this quick fix, there is no glory in being so damned lazy!
It is just so easy for the federal government to simply up the GST and sit back and congratulate themselves on a "job well done".
I have yet to hear one word about a more difficult (part) solution – the abolition of Australia's greatest tax rort: negative gearing tax concessions.
With negative gearing, current tax obligations, for those able to take advantage of it, are morphed into concessionally taxed capital gains.
No one can show me how this could in any way be considered fair to all taxpayers.
All the tripe about renters being affected have been soundly refuted, time after time.
I am not saying that the costs (interest, in the main), other than directly operational, should not be deducted, but rather, they should be accumulated and form part of the capital cost base to be offset against any tax liability at disposal.
Surely that would not only be seen as being a fairer solution for all taxpayers, not to mention the all-important tax collection for the government, which I am told would be around $4 billion per annum, but would also give credibility to the genuine "investment" value of the asset in question!
Sure, this would prove more difficult to implement than some lazier tax increases, but isn't being Aussie all about fairness, equality, etc?
Now, where were we on corporate tax and super contributions tax? Not to mention three levels of government to manage a paltry 24 million people!
There are ways, I am suggesting, to save versus taxing more.
Mike Holland
Long Beach
An end to cruelty
Today I am ashamed to admit I am an Australian.
The announcement that our High Court has found the offshore housing of asylum seekers on Manus Island to be lawful is shocking to me.
What is more shocking is that this ruling is because of the new set of laws rushed through the Parliament in the middle of last year; laws that were supported by Liberal and Labor.
I thought that the most ugly, nasty, vicious government I would ever see was the one when Phillip Ruddock and John Howard oversaw the lies about children thrown overboard from the Tampa.
But oh no! Mr Morrison and Mr Dutton are giving them a run for their money.
We are being governed by people who seem only to be able to view the world through the prism of privilege; the privilege of where they were born to or to whom they were born.
Any Australian who is not of Aboriginal decent is either descendant of a convict or from economic migrant stock. To look down one’s nose at the asylum seekers who need assistance to be safe is callous and cruel.
Vote this government out.